Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

Sparky wrote:

“bq. Vagina.
“I pronouced it VA-gih-na, with the same stress as in ‘vaginal.’ ”

Yeah, Sparky, and I’m sure that you too have noticed a million people mispronouncing CLIT-or-is as “cli-TOR-is”. We ought to talk about these things a lot more so we can all learn the proper pronunciations. Prudishness is apparently inimical to proper pronunciation, LOL!

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

I was just remembering yet another word that I mispronounced in my mind, and that is bedraggled. I pronounced it BED-raggled and believed it meant the tousled (ragged?) way a person looks after sleeping.

Then it occurred to me that we may be on to a subcategory of eggcorn, one not caused by mishearing but by misreading. At least some of the words people have listed carried a distinct imagery that the reader extrapolated from the mispronunication, such as “bed-raggled.”

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

Definitely eggcornish.

Which modality of signage is similar is of course the issue: here the written sign is the same for either construal, but the spoken sign is strikingly different. In more typical eggcorns the spoken sign is (nearly) the same for either construal, and the written may or may not be.

I expect for sign languages something similar might well hold. But it would depend on the language having signs that were extremely similar if not identical. Be an interesting question.

Bed-raggled is just a beautiful example in any case.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-08-14 23:07:03)

*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

Well, what about things you misunderstood and mispronounced? I was reading the preface to The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton this morning, and was momentarily puzzled by a note on the dedication that appeared in an earlier version of the book: “These ghostly straphangers to Walter de la Mare.”

I thought, “What’s a ‘stra-fin-jur’? Must be Greek—the str of ‘astro,’ the ph of ‘pharmacy’....” Then finally the brain of this native Westerner inserted a hyphen between “strap” and “hanger.”

I’ve rarely seen the word “straphanger,” but in my few encounters I always thought it was a jocular name for commuters on the New York subway. But Wharton seems to be using it to refer to someone/-thing that rides on someone else’s coattails.

[Edit. The OED only has the commuter sense listed, but Wikipedia offers support for my reading of the Wharton. Under the “Other Definitions” section of the “Straphanger” article, Wikipedia says, “”Straphanger” is sometimes used to mean a person who benefits from the actions and exertions of someone else, with no efforts of their own; someone who is “just along for the ride”.” Hey, OED, time to revise this one.]

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

From today’s version of World Wide Words:

By the way, people sometimes think indices is an English plural and so make a singular noun indice from it (apice and vertice are also very occasionally seen). Examples of indice can be found going back a century or more, not always in uneducated writing. A note by Charles Doyle appeared in the Winter 1979 issue of American Speech: “At a recent academic gathering, a literary savant began his speech with a quotation that spoke of certain indices. Thereafter, at least a dozen times, the speaker referred to this or that indice (ending like jaundice).” It most recently appeared in the Washington Post on 22 August 2008: “Yet as an indice of some of the lines of attack that the McCain camp is employing it is of great interest.” Thus does language change …

Presumably these people pronounced the plural to rhyme with jaundices or premis(s)es or promises?

In any case, this is a backformation, but related to what we’ve been talking about. I can easily see people pronouncing it to rhyme with “dice” rather than “jaundice”. Or “ín-de-see”, in another back-formation.

I have recorded several people using “crisee” as the singular of “crises”.

I’m not sure the pronunciation “premisees” was ever standard for me, but I’m sure I have used it.

Times I’ve thought people were using a singular “parenthesis” meaning a set of parentheses, they may have been using a spelling pronunciation of “parentheses” itself, with schwa instead of ee for that last vowel.

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-08-30 15:31:51)

*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

Long time, no post, great to be back

I too, was a voracious reader as a child. Not just books but anything with words eg packaging, shop signs. The first word I remember mispronouncing is antique. I asked my father “What does an ant-ee-cue shop sell?”. Also thanks to my mother’s mispronunciation, I used to say “mis-pro-NOUN-see-ay-shun”. I never noticed the missing ‘O’ when reading it. I’m not sure now at what point I changed to “mis-pro-NUN-se-ay-shun” but am now hyper-aware of anyone else saying it incorrectly.
Hm, my mother was schooled by nuns and was terrified of them for much of her young life, I wonder if that’s why she replaced the nun with a noun?

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

Just playing around—embracing the incongruity, if you like. Also a kind of reference to Sandi’s post (#90 above).
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I have always loved iconic (self-referential) and counter-iconic (self-contradictory) words, such as multisyllabic and monosyllabic. Words like “snargled”, “intertwingled”, and “entwangled” are much better words than “mixed” or “entangled” and so forth, because they embody their meaning. Similarly, then, it just seems like mispronunciation ought to be mis-pronounciated since that is its meaning. There’s also a kind of fun in purposefully pronouncing a sort of “prissy” word in an obviously crude way: I have a brother who takes great pleasure in disclosing to people that he is not a “k’nowser” of fine wines.
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There’s actually a classic paradox tied to this situation (a version of the liar paradox). You divide all words into two classes, those which are self-descriptive and those which are not. Then you ask which class the word non-self-descriptive fits in. (If it is, it isn’t, and if it isn’t it is …)
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I mentioned in another post, but might as well repeat as iconic of the fact, that I am inordinately proud of having gotten into print the sentence: “English exhibits a definite propensity for diminutivity, even monosyllabicity, in its lexical formulations; on the other hand, it likes long words too.”

Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-12-07 05:42:10)

*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

Just ran across one of these from years ago. C.S. Lewis, in the preface to the Screwtape Letters , refers to

the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity—the frigid houris of a teatable paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying ‘Fear not.’ The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, ‘There, there’.

I remember various attempts (mostly tending to the salacious) on my part to figure out what in heaven a “teatable paradise” might be. It wasn’t till years later that it dawned on me that it might well be a tea-table paradise.

*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

Wow—I wonder if Lewis had been thinking about Donne’s poem “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Donne’s narrator is watching his girlfriend get undressed for bed, and one section of the poem at the end of the first strophe highlights a number of the same things as Lewis’s remark—the female figure, the difficulty of differentiating angels from demons, Islamic conceptions of paradise and (you rather than Lewis) more than a suggestion of salaciousness:

In such white robes, heaven’s angels used to be
Received by men; thou, angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

I’d never thought of the Elegy together with that passage, but, as you say, it certainly does have a lot of parallels. Lewis may well have had it in mind. (I agree, though, that he probably didn’t intend “teatable” to have salacious overtones.)
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Speaking of that last line, a friend once related the effect on him of an eerie experience, saying “It made all the hair stand up on the back of my end.”

*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .

Re: Things you read and understood but mispronounced in your mind

Speaking of that last line, a friend once related the effect on him of an eerie experience, saying “It made all the hair stand up on the back of my end.”

My wife and I have been catching up on some of the old Poirot videos. Peter Ustinov did six Poirot movies, I think, and David Suchet continues his almost twenty-year run on ITV and PBS as Agatha’s Belgian detective.

Each Poirot video production features at least one good idiom blend. Blends are Poirot’s verbal trademark. Perhaps we should call idiom blends “Poirots.”